Field
The disclosed embodiments relate to techniques for querying social network data. More specifically, the disclosed embodiments relate to techniques for performing fast querying of social network data.
Related Art
Social networks may include nodes representing individuals and/or organizations, along with links between pairs of nodes that represent different types and/or levels of social familiarity between the nodes. For example, two people represented by nodes in a social network may be connected as friends, acquaintances, family members, and/or professional contacts. Social networks may further be tracked and/or maintained on web-based social networking services, such as online professional networks that allow the individuals and/or organizations to establish and maintain professional connections, list work and community experience, endorse and/or recommend one another, run advertising and marketing campaigns, promote products and/or services, and/or search and apply for jobs.
In turn, social networks and/or online professional networks may facilitate business activities such as sales, marketing, and/or recruiting by the individuals and/or organizations. For example, sales professionals may use an online professional network to locate prospects, maintain a professional image, establish and maintain relationships, and/or engage with other individuals and organizations. To fully leverage the online professional network in conducting business activities, the individuals and/or organizations may perform complex queries of the online professional network. For example, a sales professional may identify sales prospects by searching the online professional network for a chain of individuals and/or organizations that can be used to connect the sales professional to the sales prospects.
However, complex querying of social and/or online professional network data may be time- and/or resource-intensive. For example, a query that finds possible paths between two nodes in the online professional network may require a scan of all links between individuals and/or organizations that may be used to form a path connecting the nodes, with the number of links to be scanned increasing exponentially with the number of hops in the path. Moreover, a subset of the individuals and/or organizations may have a significantly larger than average number of links to other individuals and/or organizations, resulting in the added consumption of computational resources and/or time during execution of the query if the subset of individuals and/or organizations is included in the search space of the query.
Consequently, querying of social and/or online professional networks may be facilitated by mechanisms for improving the performance of complex queries of social and/or online professional network data.
In the figures, like reference numerals refer to the same figure elements.